White Water Death

White Water Death

A park ranger on a horse rode up behind Terry Rypkema and me and pleaded for our help. “You have a climbing rope,” she said. “Bring it up to the bridge, please. We have a possible drowning.”

Terry and I had driven from our homes in Wyoming to Yosemite National Park with plans to climb the Snake Dike route on Half Dome, the iconic mountain every visitor sees at the eastern end of Yosemite Valley. We had walked a mile up the Vernal Falls Trail to the footbridge.

Ahead of us, we could see a crowd of people standing on and around the footbridge. One man, with tear-reddened eyes, strode quickly toward us. He explained that he was the American sponsor for a group of Japanese students who were on a tour of the United States. They had been to several locations on the tour, and on this day, had walked to the Vernal Falls Footbridge to see the falls and have a picnic. Several of the teenage boys had been playing around near the Merced River, jumping from rock to rock and enjoying the day. One boy had slipped and fallen into the icy meltwater. A friend of his had tried to reach him and had either slipped in or jumped in to help rescue the first boy. The powerful current of the Merced River had swept both boys under the footbridge.

A young American man had seen their plight. He had tried to catch the first boy, but had missed him. Several people on the bridge had removed their belts and the American had made a makeshift rope out of the belts, but that had not worked either. In fact, for his trouble, the American ended up trapped in the violent white water, as well.

When Terry and I walked onto the bridge, we could see the second Japanese boy and the American stranded on a rock in the middle of the river. White water was crashing all around them. They were wet, cold, and shivering.

I tied our climbing rope to a tree, then belayed Terry down the bank to the river’s edge. Terry tossed one end of the rope out to the rock and the American helped the Japanese boy tie it around his waist. The boy moved to the edge of the rock. I held Terry secure with the belay while he talked to the boy, motioning him to leave the rock and swim to the bank. The boy hesitated. Terry motioned again for him to move. He shook his head. He had been in the freezing water once and had no interest in going in again.

“I asked him twice to come to me,” Terry said. “He froze up. He wouldn’t move, so I gave the rope a good tug.”

Launched into the water with Terry’s pull, the boy dogpaddled to the bank. He scrambled among the rocks, clawing to get up and out of the water. He was cold, stiff, and frightened.

“We reeled him in,” Terry said. “He was pretty banged up, and he was hypothermic. He was pretty happy to be on the bank with us.”

We had our backpacks with all of our clothing and camping gear next to us, so we pulled out a couple of sweaters and jackets and wrapped him in those. Two people from the bridge came down and helped him walk back to the bridge.

Terry threw the rope back out to the rock. The American tied it around his own waist and as soon as we had the rope tight, he jumped in and moved quickly to Terry. He seemed in much better shape, more coherent, than the Japanese boy, although he had scrapes and bruises from banging on the rocks in the river.

With the two safely off the rock, we returned to the bridge and met the ranger. She asked if we would help her search for the first Japanese boy. We talked to several people on the bridge and got different stories from each one. “That was the hard part for me,” Terry said. “We just couldn’t get any accurate information to help us search. It was frustrating. We weren’t sure who was still in the water and who was out. I was still hoping that we would find him clinging to the side and could help him get out.”

We walked along the river’s edge, gazing into each pool, trying to see through the tumbling water. Twice I stopped. An underwater tree branch took the form of an arm bent at the elbow. A tuft of grass waving in the current became a head of hair. Imagination. The mind sees what it wants to see.

We did not find him, so we returned to the bridge, knowing that if the ride through the cataracts had not killed him, that much time in the icy water would have. By then, a ranger with scuba-diving gear had arrived. He tied a rope to a tree for protection, lowered himself into a large pool below the bridge, and surfaced a minute later with the body.

As one, the Japanese students screamed. Their wonderful tour of America was forever marred. It was a painful scene, and we wanted no more of it. We wanted out, away. There was nothing else Terry and I could do. We took our packs and walked to the trail.

Behind us we heard a voice. The Japanese boy who had been stranded on the rock ran up to us and shook our hands. He was trying to talk to us, but he did not speak English. All he could say was, “Your name?” What could he say? What could we say? I held his hand and looked into his eyes. I won’t ever forget what they said. We couldn’t talk to each other, but our communication was real. I fought back the tears and turned up the trail.

Terry and I walked up the steep trail to Vernal Falls. We said nothing. It wasn’t just the roar of Vernal Falls that kept us from talking. We were both lost in thoughts about the dead Japanese boy and his devastated group of friends.

Just past Emerald Pool, the main trail continues east into Little Yosemite Valley, then turns north to the base of the east side of Half Dome. The standard climb, a system of cable handrails supported by steel posts drilled into the rock, leads to the summit of Half Dome. We intended to climb the west side, descend the cable route, and return to the valley the next day.

To get to the west side, we took the cut off between Mt. Broderick and Liberty Cap. Here, we finally stopped and talked about the drowning. We were both rattled by the events of the afternoon. We considered turning around, but decided that since we had driven all the way from Wyoming to California, we should at least set up camp at Lost Lake and see how we felt in the morning.

We began our descent from the saddle between Mt. Broderick and Liberty Cap to Lost Lake as the sun was fading. The shortcut turned out to be “true bushwacking,” as Terry noted, and too soon, we found ourselves stumbling through the trees in darkness. We corrected our route and ran into a swamp which we soon determined to be Lost Lake. In the confusion of the events at the Vernal Falls Footbridge, we had not refilled our water bottles. We had no water, so we filled one bottle from Lost Lake. It was clear with no bad taste, so we drank. We didn’t really have a choice. The next day we noticed a few bugs and weeds in the water, but no side effects. Perhaps, as comic relief to the serious events of the day before, we joked throughout the day about critters crawling around in our insides creating a condition we called Swamp Water Deleria.

In the morning, we found our climbing route easily and had an exciting climb on the Snake Dike. The focus on the climbing helped both of us clear our minds of the tragedy. We reached the summit and sat down for lunch. Moments later, a family arrived after climbing the cable route. The kids ran around the summit, excited about the adventure. They ran much too close to the north edge which drops a vertical mile into Yosemite Valley. Terry and I did not want to witness another disaster, so we packed up, hiked down the cable route and followed the trail down past Nevada Falls and Vernal Falls. At the footbridge, we stopped. We were the only people there. It was so peaceful, so beautiful. It was hard to imagine what had happened at that same spot only 24 hours before.

The drowning in Yosemite National Park had happened on August 21, 1978. Over the years, I thought about those people. I thought about the family of the drowned boy. I thought about his friends. I wondered what happened to the Japanese boy we pulled off the rock. I wondered how the American man had recovered from his injuries. I felt sorrow for the sponsor who wanted to help the students have an incredible experience in the United States and had had to live his life with the memories of the incident at the footbridge. I did not know any of their names. I did not know anything about them except for the few scraps of information we heard during the brief time we were at the bridge. I assumed that I would never hear any more about any of them.

Then, on February 9, 2016, more than 37 years after the drowning, I discovered a book called Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite on a library shelf. I picked up the book and saw a section on drownings. It did not take long to find the event Terry and I had witnessed. The authors, Ghiglieri and Farabee, analyzed over 900 deaths in Yosemite from falls, drownings, murders, suicides, and various other causes. The account of the drowning covered a page and a half.

The boy who drowned was 16. His name was Chol Han from Kyoto Fu, Japan. The boy who ended up stranded on the rock in the middle of the river was Uchi Urano. The American who tried to save the boys and attempted to use the rope made of belts was James Sumpter from San Diego.

The authors interviewed many witnesses about the drowning and concluded that Han had been showing off while rock-hopping, leading to his initial fall into the river. They explained that after he attempted to grab the belts, “the current swept him away. Indeed, Sumpter had ventured so far out into the river to help Han that he too was swept downstream in Han’s wake. Two unidentified rock climbers who happened along the shoreline at this moment now rushed forward into the river to save Sumpter. By the time they hauled him out of the water, he had suffered cuts and bruises and head injuries. This helpful pair of climbers-now-rescuers then quickly turned their attention to yet another Japanese student, Uchi Urano. Also 16 years old, Urano too had jumped into the Merced to help rescue Han, and he too had been swept down the whitewater for his troubles. Luckily the two mystery climbers managed to snag Urano, too. In short, had it not been for the timely advent of these two climbers, Han’s episode may very likely have resulted in the deaths of Sumpter and Urano—his two would-be-rescuers.”

We were strangers, gathered in an instant of white water death in the icy currents of the Merced River. We had only a brief time together at the Vernal Falls footbridge, but that experience is a thread that runs through nearly four decades of our lives and leaves us with a sense of tragedy, a very human moment, amidst the beauty and grandeur of the rivers, trees, and mountains of Yosemite National Park.

Steve Gardiner recently retired after teaching high school English and journalism for 38 years. He is the 2008 Montana Teacher of the Year and is a National Board Certified Teacher. He has published over 600 articles in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Educational Leadership, Phi Delta Kappan, and many others. He has published three books about mountain climbing and one about teaching reading.

Editors’ Choice

Get Social

Recent Books

The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 11 presents stimulating, inspiring, and uplifting adventures from women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples, and facets of themselves. The common threads connecting these stories are a female perspective and fresh, compelling storytelling to make the reader laugh, weep, wish she were there, or be glad she wasn’t.

The 31 true travel stories in this year’s collection are, as always, wildly diverse in theme and location. They tell of places like California and Cuba, Switzerland and Singapore, Iran and Iceland, Montana and Mexico and Mongolia and Mali, our own back yards and some of the farthest, most extreme corners of the world. They are the personal stories we can’t help but collect when we travel, stories of reaching out to embrace the unfamiliar and creating cross-cultural connections while learning more about ourselves.

Travelers’ Tales publishes books about the world and life-changing experiences that happen on the road. The Best Travel Writing, Volume 11 is our latest collection of great stories guaranteed to ignite your wanderlust.

Don George has been captivating readers with chronicles of his wandering adventures for four decades. Here you’ll find his best stories and essays, from climbing Kilimanjaro and contemplating the magic of Uluru to exploring the jungles of Cambodia and the backcountry temples of Shikoku. Let Don open your eyes to the wonders of the world as he falls in love in Greece, encounters whales in Mexico and elephants in East Africa, makes roof tiles in Peru, dances like a South Seas warrior on Aitutaki, and much more.

Travelers’ Tales publishes books about the world and life-changing experiences that happen on the road. The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10 is our latest collection of great stories guaranteed to ignite your wanderlust.

“Tell me,” poet Mary Oliver once wrote, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Oliver’s quote opens the The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 10: True Stories from Around the World. And to answer the question, thirty celebrated and emerging writers invite you to ride shotgun as they travel the globe to discover new places, people, and facets of themselves. The essays are as diverse as the destinations, the common thread being fresh, compelling storytelling that will make you laugh, weep, wish you were there, or thank your lucky stars you weren’t. The Best Women’s Travel Writing speaks to the reasons why we travel—and how travel changes our lives.

Rolf Potts has taken his keen postmodern travel sensibility into the far reaches of five continents as a travel writer for such prestigious publications as National Geographic Traveler, Salon.com, and The New York Times Magazine. This book documents his boldest, funniest, and most revealing journeys—from getting stranded without water in the Libyan Desert, to crashing the set of a Leonardo DiCaprio movie in Thailand, to learning the secrets of Tantric sex in a dubious Indian ashram.

Marco Polo Didn’t Go There is more than just an entertaining journey into fascinating corners of the world. It is a unique window into travel writing, with each chapter containing a “commentary track”—humorous endnotes that reveal the ragged edges behind the experience and creation of each tale. Offbeat and insightful, this book is an engrossing read for students of travel writing as well as armchair wanderers.

Travelers’ Tales publishes books about the world and life-changing experiences that happen on the road. The Best Travel Writing, Volume 9 is our latest annual collection of great stories guaranteed to ignite your wanderlust.

Includes stories by Susan Orlean, Ann Hood, and Laura Fraser
Since the publication of A Woman’s World in 1995, Travelers’ Tales has been publishing award-winning books by and for women. We continue this tradition with The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 8, the latest collection in our annual series guaranteed to inspire women to take their first trip—or to continue exploring the world with wit, soul, and verve, as so many adventurous women do each and every day.

“A most diverting and picaresque tale, one that reads like a sentimental journey of a hundred years ago.”
—the late Norman Cousins

In the early 1960s, a young, self-taught musician set out to travel the world with no money, equipped only with his guitar, his voice, and his belief in the goodness of people. Along the way, blown by the winds of fortune, guided by instinct, he played for kings and paupers, soldiers and servants, artists and terrorists. His name is Moro Buddy Bohn, and his unlikely and powerful story will uplift you and inspire you to live the life you want.

His audiences have included Queen Elizabeth II of England, King Frederick IX of Denmark, Pablo Picasso …

The Best Travel Writing 2011 is the eighth volume in the annual Travelers’ Tales series launched in 2004 to celebrate the world’s best travel writing—from Nobel Prize winners to emerging new writers. The points of view and perspectives are global, and themes encompass high adventure, spiritual growth, romance, hilarity and misadventure, service to humanity, and encounters with exotic cuisine.